Grey
by Archea
Summary: Lestrade takes the hat with him on his first day back. L/S, mild Reichenangst. Written for Morgenstuart.


_Hi, people ! No, I'm not giving up on "Wise Child" – RL is just being a bit clingy and time-consuming. Meanwhile, have a dip in and out of Reichenangst with the boys._

**Grey**

He takes the hat with him on his first day back.

There is a coat hook inside his door where Lestrade used to hang his coat every day but one. Early morning ritual, just him and the clear gelid light filling the empty room seconds before the day moved into its familiar hurly-burly of voices and knocks and the hot terracotta smell of coffee merging with the first bleat of his phone.

In the days when work was a labour of love.

_"Trust me, Lestrade, if it were my call, all you'd be consulting from now on would be the Highway Code on a Hounslow roundabout. You fucking amateur. But no, looks like the higher-ups want to play softly-softly in your case."_

_"Sir –"_

_"Shut up. Just – shut up. We're holding one and only one press conf over this shit, and you're out of it. You're not to talk of that man, not here, not outside here, he's done with, blotted out, PNG, finished, and praise God for good riddance. If I hear you've so much as mentioned his name, you'll find yourself wishing it was Hounslow. Do I make myself clear?"_

_"..."_

_"You'll need to work on that look too. You better be a hard worker, Lestrade. We've redeployed your team, but Gregson could do with a hand, man still thinks "report" is a posh name for bang-bang. Off with you, and remember to keep your gob shut."_

On his second day, he hangs the hat onto the window stay. The high window faces the office door across his desk, so high means that the latch comes at eye-level for any random visitor. Sometimes Lestrade lifts his head from the lumpy sea of papers and looks at the hat in all the gathering Spring light.

Sometimes he holds out his hand and touches a fingertip to it.

* * *

><p>The hat had been Sally's idea.<p>

It raises a wince in retrospect, how proud he had been of his team then, thinking they'd done it at last, mended the small gashes carved by Sherlock's less than suave ego over the years. Not that he'd ever held much hope of seeing the guys play Happy Families with Sherlock. A believer, he, not a sodding mystic.

But one of them had said hats off to the freak with a full-voiced chuckle, in the buoyant high of success, and Sally had chimed in at once, speaking of hats... - and the next thing he knew, Lestrade was walking down the aisle in Harrods. Blessing Peter Ricoletti (and the Signora too) for letting himself be arrested pat in the midpoint of sales.

The hat had been Sally's idea, but the choice was his. Sherlock must have known as soon as he'd ripped off the silverish paper: he'd teased Greg mercilessly as they left the conference room.

_"Grey. Now why would you chose a grey one, I wonder?"_

_"Yeah, well, we did think of getting you an orange one. With a flashing light and siren, preferably, so the guys can be well warned —"_

_"Oooh. Oh, I see it now. A memory jogger, in case I happened to delete your name again. Really, Inspector. What a sad lack of confidence."_

_"You wish. Nah, take it as the resident greyhead's compliment. To your little grey cells. Though Sally says you'll be bringing galoshes back next..."_

He'd seen the hat again, that night at 221B when he was reading Sherlock his rights. The hat sat on the skull, tilted coquettishly sideways, its topknot gleaming under the pale domestic neons. (Trust Sherlock Holmes to avoid rosy lampshades.) Greg had spared it a glance and turned his head, forgetting it in the heated blast of craziness that had followed. Until it came back to him, the words, the voice. Merciless.

Sad lack of confidence, Inspector.

Now there is no one to tell that he did, in fact, trust well before the eleventh hour, trusted as soon as Sherlock's finger touched his brow. And so, the hat. The hat which is grey and empty but will bloody well heed Sherlock's words and serve as a memento. Here, where it can double as a denial. A vote of protest. And a penance.

He turns his head and smiles at the hat. "The great Sherlock Holmes - got it spot on, didn't you? Except for the name. It's not about me, this. It never was, but it's all right. Because I'm gonna see to it that you get your name back, _mon gosse_, if that's the last thing I do. Now shut up and let me think."

* * *

><p>The months go by. The hat stays.<p>

Lestrade discovers that his is a slow task. While Richard Brook quickly proves to have been as elusive as his name, the inquest on Sherlock's death - only echoed back to him in tattered whispers along the Met corridors - seems to dissolve just as quickly. As case after case fails to indict the dead man, Lestrade waits for a statement that never comes. The Met, it seems, have an omertà of their own. It's All he can do is gather the odds and ends that will vindicate Sherlock, compile a case on the side, and wait in that grey zone where no lie lives long but no truth can be spoken, not yet.

The press, meanwhile, have their cream tea over "Bluffin' Sherlock", smack their lips happily and move on to the next fleshpots.

But as the first winter becomes entangled with the second year and John Watson sends news of his impending marriage, Lestrade becomes aware of a change in the air.

It begins with Stanley Hopkins signing all of his reports twice over with his initials, a perfectly redundant device and a first in his case. Since Hopkins doubles as their liaison officer with Human Resources and the Met's Sports Club, this means "SH" becomes a well-known sign on their floor.

Greg grins quietly, remembering the other man's high-pitched stutter the first time he entered the office after Lestrade's fall from grace. But Hopkins is one of the rare officers Sherlock used to credit with a modicum of brains, and Lestrade is not surprised at this ingenious tip of the hat - or to the hat.

And suddenly, the tips are everywhere. Someone hacks into the Met's central computer system and for twenty-four hours a photograph of a young man in a garish blanket graces every screen on the Yard's premises. Graffitis of "Wrong!", "CS, Go Holmes" and racier variants are quick to follow. Greg finds that the coffee vending machine in their break room now answers to a name, and, for the first time in two years, stops Sally Donovan on her way out.

"The Freak, eh? Nice move, Sergeant."

Sally is looking at her natty black shoes. "Had to do my bit, right? I mean, you know how it is. Either wait ten bloody minutes or forget about the change, or it pours so fast the cup topples and you feel like whacking the thing into next Tuesday. And the coffee is searing hot and never sugar-friendly. But it always delivers. Always."

"Donovan."

She raises her eyes to him then, dark and glistening in the puddled lights of the car park - the rain has begun. "I'm sorry," she says at last. "Not for doing what I did, because it still feels like it was the right thing. It's what you taught us first, remember? Never to hush what you felt was offside? But now, I know it was - not good. Right, but not good. And if, if I hadn't —"

"Sally," he tries again, helplessly aware that it should be Sherlock, not him, casting about for the words that absolve. Not that Sherlock Holmes would be bothered with absolution, 'course. Trust the bastard to deputize such trivia to Lestrade even from the grave. Lestrade takes in a damp breath.

"Sally, lass. Surely they told you, Gregson and his lot? I've kept the hat. His hat. Would you like to see it?"

And he doesn't have to say more. She bends her head to the crook of his arm, and as he listens to the first warm whimper rising from her throat, he lets the March rain envelop them, prepared to wait out the fall.

* * *

><p>When the end comes, it comes, almost proverbially, with a whisper and a bang.<p>

Lestrade is in his office, tying a few extra rosettes in Gregson's red tape and wondering, not for the first time, if the powers that be were informed that the letter killeth. Probably not, or they wouldn't expect officers to go on taking down statements after an arrest has been made. But this is a riddle that not even Sherlock could crack in his bravura days, and Greg grunts in relief when his phone chirps out. If he's very, very lucky, Tob needs another crash course on the Care and Feeding of Your Budget Director and he can treat his deltoids to a badly needed break.

The voice is deep-edged, stern and to the point. The voice is also a loved voice, a long lost voice and a voice that, up to the last three years, would quicken every pore in Gregory Lestrade's body to a secret prickle of expectancy.

On the negative side, the voice makes no sense at all.

"Greg. When I tell you to duck, duck."

A man's soul and a man's mechanical response to the unexpected are often more closely knit than we give them credit for. Two years ago, it would have been Greg's blood, the burn of it on his face, answering the sick fuck on the active end of the joke. Give it twelve months and he'd have let himself speak first, breath hurrying, shocked into a curse, before he began to process the words.

But the truth is that in the last stretch of year he has been selfish, selfish; driving them to raise the late man's name east and west around him, yeah, from the Yard's bogs to the Yard's Intranet (heading the senior officers' petition, the pick of them too, to have the inquiry reopened) until they were well and truly haunted to his savage joy. It is as if they'd all prepared him for this moment, shaping a ghost for him till the ghost could be claimed at last, and what's better for the claiming than a voice on a phone, bodiless for all its sharp-soft tones.

Or it could be that Lestrade's heart, yet another stubborn git, was only waiting for this moment.

Whatever the cause, Sherlock's voice says Now and Lestrade's veteran years of football practice kick in. He barely hears the whizz of air in his dive to the side – the sound of impact he can't miss when it misses him. When he looks up, the hat is no longer on the stay and there is a bullet in the window, stuck inside a few cracked rings of glass like a fly turned spider.

In the common office, there is another crash-and-bang, and he finds himself staring at the young official whose name always escapes him – perhaps because he is (was) such a clear copy of Dimmock. The young man is sitting before his computer screen with a dot, red and trickling, in the middle of his forehead. Later on, Lestrade will think mark of Cain. Later still, he will find that the news bulletin on the screen is a fake, though true enough – for one small detail – in its report of one Sebastian Moran's suicide in circumstances unplumbed and a Soho bedsitter.

"The odds," the voice says (making even less sense now it is no longer aerial) "were fifty-fifty. He could kill you or he could kill himself, though he was gracious enough to prove me right on both counts. Lestrade, I swear you are going to faint."

In the whole nine years of their acquaintance, Lestrade has only once questioned Sherlock's word. As he keels forward into a graceless heap, his last thought is that won't be charged with a second offence.

* * *

><p>Later on, when the force of circumstance has pulled him out of limbo, making him a vertical DI again so he can begin to sort out this new mess, Lestrade finds that his office hosts another risen man.<p>

He lets the door shut them in with a gentle click and waits.

"You would keep the hat," Sherlock says at last, and Lestrade chokes in painful thanksgiving as he crosses the impalpable gap between them to inspect the man at close quarters.

The hat has in somehow made it atop the paperwork on his desk, from which elevated position it peers rather cockily at Sherlock, both earflaps perking up to attention. Sherlock is looking back at the hat, and Lestrade is looking at Sherlock.

"Did you —" he begins and suddenly, he's crap at interrogating. What he needs to ask goes without saying, the whys and hows that fatten his trade, but what he wants to know for real is, Did you, did you feel any of it, what you put us through, the raw, racking, grovelling, the killing hurt? But all of this would mean anger, and Lestrade, with an incredulous chuckle, finds that his cheeks are running wet.

"T-t-," he croaks instead, squashing the tears out with the heel of his hand, and never mind that Sherlock is watching him, his face crimpled and vulnerable as it hasn't been for a long time now. "Took you long enough, _mon gosse_."

Sherlock is watching him.

"Wanker could have offed me thirty times these last years," Lestrade throws in quickly to cover his tracks.

"Chris Moran? Wrong." Still the quiet tones. Something's changed there – what has become of his voltaic Sherlock, the man who giggled on crime scenes and rushed in where SOCOs feared to tread? Why isn't Sherlock smiling? Why isn't he hurrying? "Not unless he was given a sign to, and I —"

There's a knock at the door, followed by the door ushering in his immediate superior. If Tob is dismayed at the sight of his deputy inspector's tear-rugged face, he has the decency to pretend it's all in a day's work, like the cracked window and the deadalive visitor. "Greg, they want your arse in the press room, pronto. Yours too, Holmes. All the usual suspects, not counting the foreign correspondents, and don't ask me who summoned them but you'd better find a hanky, man, or the tabloids will have a field day." He looks from one man to the other, then closes the door carefully.

"— made sure that he wouldn't be, not until I was in charge. Tonight was entirely monitored, Greg; you never ran a risk."

Greg opens his mouth to differ, not too respectfully at that, but Sherlock cuts him short. "I killed Sebastian Moran six weeks after my death. The rest was damage control, as they say; I'll spare you a tedious tale. I killed him first, and he was the first I killed. So. Do you still want me to come with you to the press room?"

He has picked up the hat, scowling at the double front as he used to, Greg remembers from John's half kept, half gritted tales, the lengthened-out stories that never made it to his blog but saw them through the first nights after the Fall. A mad cap. Facing forward, facing backward, whichever way you put it. If only he can tell Sherlock in so many words, but answers have always been Sherlock's strong suit, not Greg's. So he asks a question instead, putting as much weight as he dares in it.

"He'd have killed you any other way, right? "

Lestrade waits until he has the pellucid, intense eyes in his line of sight and Sherlock is nodding his answer.

"Good, then. Now put your hat on and let's go and feed the lions."

"But —" The lean face falters into a frown as Sherlock bends it a little to scan him better.

Oh, for God's sake, Greg thinks, enfolding the killer into a hug, face and all, six feet two of warm, obstinate mortality tucked into the taut circle of his arms. As if what's good enough for John isn't good enough for you, you stupid snob. Don't you make me tell you about right and good and the workings of a man's heart, Sherlock Holmes, because two hundred and forty three don't begin to cover it, not half, and the press are waiting. Later maybe, if you find the time, if I find the guts, I'll grab a biro and draw you that line again but right now black can bugger white and I wouldn't lift a finger to part them, not as long as the result is you, here, you, close, choking the bleeding ghost out of me – _God_, that ghost – as well you should, you fucking wonder.

He prises himself loose in the end and picks up the hat from the floor. "Put it on, Sherlock. C'mon, kid, I'm sure Sally is already sporting hers. You know what they say about getting ahead..."

But Sherlock smiles – the angled smile, old friend of his, tipped up on one side to warn all and sundry that Sherlock Holmes is savouring his own private joke. "You do it," he says, head still bent to Lestrade's. The smile is angling up to his eyes, not quite making it, because there's something else in here that Greg doesn't know how to read. "I'm not kneeling, mind."

Oh, come on now, he's not that short a friend? But Sherlock's hands are warm over Greg's as he sets the hat in place on the dark curls, and it's not as if explanations couldn't wait one more hour.

FINIS

[**A/N:** "mon gosse" is French for "kid". In my headcanon, both Lestrade and Sherlock speak French, though Lestrade's is a bit rusty, dating back to his childhood days before his French father left them.]


End file.
